PI: Brad Jones, Political Science

While considerable work has been done in the social sciences on the mechanisms that lead non-Latinos to engage in stereotyping and discriminatory practices, far less work has been done on the crucial question of how Latinos themselves perceive and process discriminatory action, rhetoric, and communication. Further, to the extent we understand how Latinos respond to stereotype threat–a concept that is deﬁned and operationalized below–our understanding of this process has been limited in two ways.

First, experimental studies of how Latinos react to stereotype threat has almost exclusively been limited to subjects who are university students with English-language skills. As such, in almost every experimental study, there is no variation in the important attribute of language use and little variation in generational status and/or immigration status. Second, to the extent studies have incorporated variation in Latino group attributes such as language use, generational diﬀerences, and immigration status, they have tended to rely on observational data (i.e. non-experimental data). Therefore, the ability to assess the causal eﬀect of stereotype threat and how threat is moderated or mediated by Latino attributes has been limited.

We argue that understanding of how Latinos respond and react to stereotype threat requires careful consideration and measurement of how attributes of Latinos moderate beliefs about stereotypes and responses to potentially discriminatory environments. In the course of this project we will create and pre-test experimental materials in both Spanish and English, assess the critical question of measurement equivalency, and provide replications and extensions of work on stereotype threat and social stigma that explicitly account for variation in group attributes.